Back in Hilton Coliseum, where she made the short drive from Ballard to watch so many games as a kid, Taylor Greenfield paused when asked about the decision that took her far away from home, weighing her answer carefully.

Back in Hilton Coliseum, where she made the short drive from Ballard to watch so many games as a kid, Taylor Greenfield paused when asked about the decision that took her far away from home, weighing her answer carefully.

Three years ago, the former Ames Tribune all-area girls basketball player of the year fretted with the decision between staying at home and accepting Iowa State coach Bill Fennelly’s scholarship offer or moving almost 2,000 miles away to play for Stanford, a perennial Final Four contender.

"It definitely came down to a really hard decision for me," said the Stanford junior, who returned to Ames for the No.2 seeded Cardinal’s NCAA tournament matchup with No. 15 seed South Dakota today. "I have a lot of family here, and I’ve had a lot of family go to Iowa State. It’s hard to say no to something like that … Stanford is like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s only 6,000 undergrads, and you have an opportunity to be one of those. Ultimately, I just kind of sat down, and it was my brother who said, ‘Taylor, please go to Stanford. You don’t know what you have in front of you.’"

So after averaging 19.9 points and 7.2 rebounds per game her senior year with the Bombers, Greenfield took her talents to Palo Alto, Calif., to play for a team that had made the Final Four in the four previous seasons.

While she wasn’t the star she was at Ballard, Greenfield became an important role player as a freshman for another Final Four team. The following year, she averaged 3.9 points before missing out on Stanford’s Sweet 16 loss to Georgia with a broken finger.

"Taylor has really some great basketball instincts," coach Tara VanDerveer said. "She’s a phenomenal passer, she’s been knocking down her shots. She can guard people when she works really hard at it. She has versatility with her size, she can pass, she can score, she can guard a big person, she can guard a little person. We were really hurt when she went out in the tournament last year … Taylor adds a tremendous amount to our team. We were glad that she was healthy and that she gets to show how good she is in front of her friends and her home fans."

This season, she’s averaged 5.7 points and has shot 40 percent from beyond the arc after missing the first eight games with a broken foot. And throughout her career, she’d grown into her role coming off the bench.

"I personally do like coming off the bench," Greenfield said. "Maybe there’s a slow point in the game, and you try to send someone in there to get a spark. I love to be able to do that. We have a lot of people on our team who can do that, which is huge. Our bench play is tremendous. To be one of those players to be able to come into the game to be able to kickstart something, I really enjoy it."

During the selection show on Monday, Greenfield didn’t even know coming back to play in Ames was a possibility.

Today, she’ll come off the bench in Hilton Coliseum, where she’ll finally be able to play in front of her hometown friends and family.

"Even when they kind of flashed (Stanford’s location) up on the screen, I still didn’t recognize it," she said. "Then, one of my teammates when I left was like, ‘We’re going to Ames,’ and I didn’t even know it was an option. I was completely caught off guard.

"It is really special."

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